Upper Darby School District, which serves more than 12,500 students and counts itself among the largest school systems in Pennsylvania, hands every student a laptop and replaces roughly 3,000 Chromebooks a year just to keep the program running. That routine maintenance now threatens to become unaffordable. A global shortage of computer memory chips, driven largely by the artificial intelligence boom, has pushed Chromebook prices up 25% year over year across vendors, and school technology officials across the region say they have no clear plan for what comes next.
Chromebooks that used to cost school districts about $400 per student now run more than $600 per student, according to WHYY. Upper Darby currently spends between $2 million and $3 million annually just to maintain its Chromebook fleet. Daniel Kitchen, the district's director of technology, said device funding should be reliably available given that classroom device use is now mandated by the state, not left to chance the way it currently is.
A Pandemic-Era Fix Meets a Chip Shortage
Before COVID-19 hit, Upper Darby had limited computer access and was not what's known as a one-to-one district, meaning not every student had a school-issued device, according to Superintendent Dan McGarry. That changed fast: the district distributed Chromebooks ordered overnight during the pandemic and later received funding from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) program, part of the nearly $13.2 billion Congress allocated to the fund starting in March 2020, to sustain the effort. But that money, per the same WHYY report, has now dried up roughly six years after it was first allocated.
McGarry said he fears the district will be unable to maintain one-to-one student computing in the near future. The timing is brutal: Pennsylvania now requires that PSSA and Keystone Exams be administered online, with paper testing reserved only for students who need formal accommodations, a mandate Chalkbeat reported Governor Josh Shapiro's administration put in place in 2024 to modernize assessments and cut paper-testing costs statewide.
Delaware County's William Penn Faces a Steeper Climb
Neighboring William Penn School District, which enrolls roughly 4,500 students and has just 4,900 student laptops on hand, is not what's considered a true one-to-one district, the WHYY report notes. Darnell Deans, the district's chief of operations, says William Penn cannot guarantee that students can take laptops home while still keeping enough devices available for classroom use. About 75% of William Penn's students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, underscoring how little room the district has to absorb sudden price spikes.
William Penn's fiscal bind traces back to a landmark court fight. The district was one of six petitioners in William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, the case that led the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court to rule in February 2023 that the state's property-tax-driven school funding system is unconstitutional. That ruling explains why districts like William Penn lack the local tax capacity to absorb a sudden laptop price spike the way wealthier suburban districts can.
Where the Chips Are Actually Going
The root cause sits far outside any school board meeting. Benjamin Lee, a computer science and electrical engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says memory-chip demand and prices are unprecedented. Data-center investment by AI companies is driving up demand for processors, memory, storage and networking equipment, and manufacturing capacity simply cannot keep pace, limiting the supply of computer hardware components available for consumer electronics like school Chromebooks.
J.P. Morgan estimates that DRAM prices have climbed more than 400% from early 2024 through the end of 2026 as chipmakers lock in long-term supply agreements with major cloud providers, according to the firm's research. Industry tracker TrendForce recorded a 90% quarter-over-quarter surge in DRAM contract prices in early 2026 alone, with laptop memory modules spiking as much as 89% in a single quarter, per a report covered by Medium. Some technology journalists have taken to calling the shortage “Ramageddon.”
Anthropic, the California-based developer of the Claude chatbot, is among the AI companies whose hundreds of billions of dollars in data-center hardware investment are cited as fueling the squeeze. Gartner projected in February that global PC shipments will fall 10.4% in 2026 as a 130% surge in memory and storage prices pushes computer retail prices up 17%, and the analyst firm predicts the sub-$500 entry-level PC market will vanish entirely by 2028.
Federal Safety Nets Are Disappearing Too
The federal programs that once cushioned districts against exactly this kind of shock have largely expired. The Federal Communications Commission's $7.17 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund, created under the 2021 American Rescue Plan to buy student laptops and home broadband, stopped funding device purchases back on June 30, 2024. The FCC's standard E-Rate program still funds school building Wi-Fi and fiber, but its rules do not cover individual student laptops.
That gap hasn't gone unnoticed. Kitchen has proposed an E-Rate-like federal program specifically to fund school Chromebooks, arguing that if the state is going to mandate device use, funding needs to follow. Meanwhile, the FCC voted 2-1 in June to open a broad review of the existing E-Rate program, with Chair Brendan Carr citing concerns over classroom screen time alongside questions about expanding device connectivity, according to Route Fifty. That review points toward regulatory uncertainty rather than expanded federal support.
A Regional Divide Over Screen Time
The financial squeeze in Delaware County stands in sharp contrast to what's happening in wealthier districts nearby. Hundreds of parents in Montgomery County's Lower Merion School District launched a Pencils Over Pixels campaign this spring, demanding the right to opt their kids out of taking home district-issued Chromebooks and MacBooks over screen-time concerns. And just days ago, Baltimore County Public Schools restricted elementary Chromebook allocations to 61% of enrollment and eliminated take-home laptops for elementary and middle schoolers, following parent campaigns over student focus and academic performance.
That tension captures the moment facing Philadelphia-area schools: some affluent communities are actively demanding fewer laptops, while underfunded districts like Upper Darby and William Penn are fighting simply to keep the devices they already have running. With ESSER dollars gone and chip prices still climbing, neither Kitchen nor McGarry has offered a clear answer for how their districts sustain one-to-one computing much longer.
